The thing that didn’t sound like trouble continued to bother her as the group prepared to leave. They had a mule and cart and two horses between the five of them. Morrie and Rovnen negotiated over supplies before they left: food for the road, cleansing charms for drinking water, potions to ward against bugs and illness. Runa thought she recognized the delicate glass vials. It made sense, that Corvin would do business in Dawdledale as well as Pothollow.

  Rovnen dug around in the cart and offered her a choice of weapons. Suspicion prickled as she inspected them. “You got these in the Cauldron?”

  “Near the Cauldron.” He smiled broadly. It looked strange, as though his face was meant for idle smirking, not grinning. “You recognize the make?”

  “Sure. The Dread Mistress herself’s army.”

  “Don’t go thinking we liberated them from an undead horde ourselves, though. We’re just the go-betweens.”

  “Uh-huh.” She weighed up a sword—it was always swords, with walking skeletons—and shrugged. “Do you have anything other than swords?”

  “Bow and arrow?”

  “You found bows from the Dread Mistress’s army in good shape?”

  “No, it’s supply your own woodwork and string, I’m afraid.” He opened a chest and showed her the pieces. “Everything else rotted away over the last two hundred years. And we didn’t find these! Can you imagine, any of us going into the Cauldron? No, we’re selling on behalf.”

  She eyed the cart warily as they prepared to set off. On behalf of who, she wondered.

  The King’s Road led away from the Cauldron at an angle, following what might once have been the edge of the forest but was now fertile farmland. The magical maelstrom that blanketed the Cauldron in snow hadn’t reached this far, and the plains were wrapped in early summer.

  Everywhere she looked, things were green, and not in an eerie-glow way, in a things-growing-the-way-they-should way.

  They passed an orchard whose branches moved in the breeze, and not of their own ill will. Birds sang, un-threateningly. A farmer waved hello, then leaned on his pitchfork and struck up a conversation with Rovnen, who managed to turn the conversation into an offer to have lunch at the farmstead. The afternoon wore on, and the farther from the Cauldron they got, the pleasanter things were.

  Rovnen got out some sort of musical instrument and started playing it.

  It should have been nice. Everything Runa heard from her groups in the Cauldron was how much more awful it was traveling in the cursed lands than anywhere else in the world. That even the risk of bandits and overzealous town guards was preferable to a single night under stars that might jump down and try to eat your face.

  Runa had always assumed she would agree. But now that she was out here…

  It was weird.

  Why hadn’t she felt like this in Pothollow? That wasn’t in the Cauldron.

  Maybe the looming ice wall had made it feel more like home.

  She frowned.

  The Cauldron wasn’t home. If you were a walking skeleton, maybe. If you were some sort of cursed beast, sure. But not for people.

  Not even people who felt more comfortable on the shifting, venomous, boot-eating dirt there than they did on the harmless dirt anywhere else in the world.

  In fact, it was probably best that people like that didn’t start thinking about the most cursed place on any continent as home.

  Runa became aware that she was grinding her teeth. She became aware because her traveling companions were edging away from her.

  And there was nothing new about that! Nothing surprising or out of the ordinary. They’d hired her on so that any bandits would see her from wherever they were hiding in the trees or—whatever those were, wheat or bean stalks or something—and decide to wait and jump the next, un-guarded group of travellers instead. She was here to look dangerous.

  This was all the same way these things always went.

  Except it wasn’t the way things had gone at Pothollow, where instead of staring at her like she might start chewing on the nearest horse, the locals had given her a place to stay and dinner and joked with her.

  Gods all damn it.

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  Midday was sliding into mid-afternoon by the time she noticed something wasn’t right. Probably she would have noticed earlier, but she was busy telling herself she had nothing to feel sorry for herself about, and everyone in Pothollow would have gotten sick of her wasting their time and baking terrible bread, and she didn’t want to be there, anyway. She wanted—she needed—to be back in Sollus Gate, so she could get back into the Cauldron, and rescue her clients, who were—she checked the beads again—perfectly daffodil-yellow safe.

  Also, her jaw hurt from all that teeth-grinding.

  Eventually, though, her senses cut through all the bullshit her mind was feeding her, and she twigged that something was wrong.

  But what?

  Not something she’d seen. Not a scent or the prickle of magic. Runa tucked her chin down, focusing on the sounds around her. Her traveling companions were laughing about something—ignore them, that wasn’t it. Her own footsteps on the hard dirt road, not that. Someone had pulled out a spindle and was twisting wool into yarn as they walked—not that.

  The horses’ tack jingling. The huff of the mule pulling the cart, and the rumble-squeak of the cart’s wheels. Everything inside the cart was packed tight, but it still made some movement noise as the cart rumbled on. Rattle, rattle. Clink, clink.

  Clink.

  Runa’s eyes narrowed.

  Clink, clink. Clink-clink.

  Clink, clink-clink, clink.

  “Hey,” she called, raising her voice above the cheerful conversation. “Did you—”

  Clink, clink-clink-clink—

  The cart lurched sideways.

  “Get down!”

  The others didn’t get down. They turned to her, wide eyes shocked, directly in the path of whatever was making the cart jerk and wobble Cauldronwards. Runa didn’t stop to think. She leapt over the mule—it stared dumbfounded at her, too—and then she was in between the cart and her group.

  “Move!” She grabbed the nearest person roughly by the arm and shoved them out of the way. “Don’t get between it and—”

  There was a crash of metal on metal and broken pottery. The cart toppled over.

  And something that had been stashed in the bottom of the cart, wrapped in heavy velvet and hidden under a stack of canvas sacks, spun out towards the Cauldron. Something secret. Something cursed, that the spell that made the Cauldron was calling back into it.

  Runa should have taken her own advice and ducked.

  But she knew what it was heading for. And she knew how fast it would get there, spinning through anything in its way until it reached the Cauldron.

  Through that friendly farmer’s homestead. Through Dawdledale. Through anything and anyone else in its way.

  And if it was going fast now, well, it would be going even faster by the time it got where it was going.

  The object struck her in the chest. It slammed the air out of her lungs. She wrapped her arms around it and magic bucked against her, fighting to escape.

  “What the hells—” someone gasped. “That was meant to—”

  “It’s nothing to worry about!” Rovnen waved his arms urgently. “The wards must have slipped. We’ll get it back into the warded chest and—”

  “Wards?” The cursed object bucked against her, trying to drive itself directly through her ribcage. She wrestled her arms around it. “Wards aren’t going to stop Vellugar’s spell from capturing it! What do you think’s happening here?”

  “We were told it would—”

  “Told by who? Same asshole who sold it to you?”

  Velvet slithered under her fingers. Whatever was underneath was round and metallic, and it shot sideways. Runa caught it as it flung itself away.

  The air hummed.

  It was a crown. Metal the colour of stormclouds twisted around and around on itself in a thorny coronet, colder than anything under the hot sun had any right to be. She could taste the curse. It sat on the back of her tongue, thick and bitter.

  Vellugar’s gathering spell didn’t grab every curse the same way. Some were dragged slowly. Some fast.

  Whatever this was, the Cauldron really wanted it back.

  “We’ll just put it back in the chest!” Rovnen sounded frantic. “Back in the—oh, that’s not good, the chest’s broken, but we can still—”

  “Still what? Smuggle a cursed crown to Billswater and sell it?” Gods, they were trying to take this thing to Billswater? It jerked in her hand and she gripped it tight, her arm pulled to its limits. “You didn’t get it purified first?”

  “He said that would reduce the value!”

  She gritted her teeth. How long had they been traveling with the cursed crown hidden by whatever half-rate wards had finally given out? Long enough for the Cauldron spell to have built up enough tension to drag it back so fast it cut through anything in its way. Including her, if she got in its way now.

  But if she let it go, it would smash through everything in its path to reach the Cauldron. Maybe a hopeful person would think it would fly upwards towards the rim of the Cauldron, missing everything in its path along the ground, but that would only put it on a direct course to Pothollow.

  She sighted along her trembling arm. The scatter of buildings was just visible between two of the crown’s thorny spikes.

  She swore.

  Rovnen and the others were still yelling. The horses had bolted. Smart. The mule had decided that whatever was going on, it didn’t like it, and was steadfastly dragging the toppled cart towards the ditch at the side of the road. Also smart.

  Runa, like her shouting traveling companions, was about to do something dumb.

  There was only one way to stop the spell from dragging a curse into the Cauldron.

  Break the curse first.

  Runa winced in advance.

  This was going to hurt.

  The crown wanted to be worn. That was as obvious as the spell hauling it back towards the Cauldron. It thrummed with magic and dripped with cold and like with so many magical things, she could practically hear it in her head. It wanted to be worn. It was power, and dread, and from the moment she put it on, all that power would be hers.

  She tightened her grip on it, and snarled, “I can’t even wear most hats.”

  With her other hand, she scrambled at her belt. There. Her fingers closed around the lightstick. Heat up fast this time, she thought, and it was like it heard her.

  She whipped it up, heat already building along the shaft, and the bubble of light at the tip flared into white-hot brilliance.

  She jammed it into the crown and slammed them both to the ground. Blazing heat met cursed cold, and somewhere behind the crown’s coiling desire to share its bounty of power and magic and so many other good things that she would discover if she only wore it, NOW, something woke up and screamed.

  The stormcloud steel shattered.

  Runa staggered back. The magical backlash was like a whip. All that cold, searching for something to sink into. She raised her hand, protecting her face, and then everything hurt too much to think.